My name is Alex Cain, and I will soon be accused of murder, and I shall be executed for it, and that will save me. For I have a plan.
But the women have made it complicated, and I am also shadowed about this city by a stranger who they say has my own face. I am curious about that, to some small extent, but not too concerned. For if he is who I think he is, then my plan will succeed, despite the peril that is contained within it.
But the women have made it complicated. Alexandra my mother and Grace my daughter; my God, what a tangled web has been woven. Or perhaps a badness has been spun. Still, there is a saying that blood is thicker than water, and the Cain women have the witchery in this family, and they excel at it. I don't. I think something has passed me by, or my brains are perhaps quite small. I do not know.
My time is spent between the chamber by the lake in which Edisson's machine rests, and Grace's apartment under the clock tower. I work on the accelerator to make sure that it will not fail me when next I depart, and Grace works on me, that she may know me who has been a stranger for all of her life. And Alexandra has told me of my birth and the forgotten Catherine and I have to believe Alexandra's tell of her aunt, because despite all of the words, the name Catherine remains a name, no more.
For the accelerator has a permanent effect of erasing memories of those I can never see again, so it is certain that Alexandra will be lost utterly to me because she surely will be dead when next the machine stops. And I will not know Grace, but she will know me.
But the women do not know what I plan, so there are secrets here that I must not reveal. So my life is a curious double one.
But it is also a pleasing one. Grace, it seems, is her mother's daughter in that she too understands the blood line and the conjuring necessary to keep it alive, and she too is learning the witchery. And it appears that there is a new animus in the blood, that was a gift from a cat, and it is within Grace now, and she is learning fast. Grace certainly leads her own life, and I am a small part of it, but she is also mysterious.
Recently, she has started to take herself away from the apartment for a day or two at a time, and then she returns, sometimes unexpectedly, sometimes at the same hour each day. It is strange, sometimes, for she will greet me as if I have been long lost or myself gone many days.
"Grace," I will say, "I saw you last Tuesday, and it is only Thursday." Still, she has a strong passion upon her, those days, and it is worth being in her way when the passion breaks.
There is a strange paleness to her, some days, as if she were translucent and her milky white skin the most fragile covering of her muscles and bones. Her high breasts will have a delicate, fine tracery of veins blue against her whiteness, with her rich red nipples jutting firm, hard to the palm of my hands and she moans as I press against her breasts and take the hard weight of them into my hands. I love the full weight and round firmness of her breasts, lush and high on her chest, a fullness, and with a deep cleavage between.
On other days there will be darkness to her skin, as if she is shadowed and in a penumbra, and it is as if her muscles have a different tone, and a leanness and a wiry strength to them. And it is strange, and I think a trick of the light, for some days it is as if the fine hairs on her arm are darker, as if there is a fine down upon them. It is often like this after she has been away a day or two.
Tonight she has returned from several nights away, and she has run herself a bath and languishes there in the heat and has taken a razor to her smooth skin. Through the open door I see one long elegant leg raised and propped on the side of the bath, and I watch as she takes her razor and slides it up her leg so her skin will be so smooth when finally she wraps a silk gown around herself and comes to our bed. And she is methodical and patient with the slide of the steel on her skin, and careful with the sharpness.
Then she stands in the bath and applies soap to the base of her belly, and slowly and carefully removes all of the tightly coiled hair that is triangled there, so that she is completely smooth. The rise of her mound is traced with a glistening of bubbles which shimmer and burst as she moves, and the small lips of her sex are a neat cleft, slightly curving a little up her belly. So too does she remove the hair from the pits of her arms, black and coiled for she is dark haired, and tonight the skin on her limbs is dark.
"Alex, come dry me, I am tired." She calls to me and I reach for a towel and wrap it warm around her as she stands by the bath. I reach the towel around her, and as I wipe down the water from her back I feel a strange ridge along the line of her shoulder blades, that is new and was not there the last time I was with her. As I dry her body, I slowly turn her away from me so that I can see her back. And I am curious, for there along the edge of her shoulder blades, on both sides where the bone juts prominent under the skin, I see a pair of dark ridges, each one eight inches long, on both sides of her back, and bumped with a row of small black follicles, as if her hair was hugely grown and thick. I trace a finger along the ridge and Grace does not react. It is as if she does not know the new strangeness is even there.
But her body is rich and delectable, and her new smoothness is different and soft under my lips and tongue, and the tidy cleft of her sex is smooth and fresh at the base of her belly. Some water droplets trail down the curves of her hips and down her thighs, and my fingers follow them. She widens her stance on the floor, and her legs are taut and the gap at the top wide and enticing, her lips with their own dew glistening there. And I gently press one finger between the slim lips and press it on into her wetness. I look up to her face and she gazes down at me with wide eyes, her mouth a round O of inhaled pleasure, and her eyes widening at the push of my finger.
Grace places both of her hands on my face as I kneel before her, her palms on my cheeks to hold my head still, and I feel a tight clench upon my finger inside her, a pull upwards into her. And my finger sinks entirely inside and she gently rocks and pivots on it, and the knuckle of my middle finger presses into the heat of her tight anus and I can feel that muscle pulse and open and close. I ease my finger down from inside her so that I can straighten both fingers, and then press my hand upwards once more. My forefinger slides easily into her cunt which Is wetter and slicker now, and the straightened finger next to it is an exquisite fit for her tighter channel.
As I press up into her she bears down ever so slightly, as if to speed the spearing of her cunt and ass upon my fingers. And then they are both deep inside her, one finger gripped and wet, the other gripped tight and hard. She clenches, and both fingers are squeezed. She rocks, my fingers within her. The muscles of her legs are tight and taut, and I glance upwards, and see that her head is arched back now, her throat long. Her body is moving so slowly upon my hand that her breasts barely move. Her nipples are long and hard.
And then there is a pair of hands upon her breasts, each palm a cup and slender fingers pressing into her flesh. I look up, and once again Grace's mouth is an O, and she gasps. "Mother, what do you do here?"
"Hush child, let me stay."
Alexandra has stepped silently into the room and stands behind the girl, her hands upon those younger, fuller breasts, and she is slow and gentle with her caress, for a mother is always gentle with her child. I gaze up at Alexandra from my kneeling place and she is behind Grace and to one side so that I can see half her body, which is clad in a long flowing leather skirt and bodice, both made of old leather which is soft and supple with its age. Her bodice is tightly laced and her breasts are slight and small, a contrast to those of Grace, which are full and high and round, and naked with her long tight nipples. Alexandra is slender and slight and fey, and her daughter my sister is curved and full and supple. Alexandra's hair is long and silver like molten metal down her back, and Grace's hair is short and midnight black.
Alexandra's leg is thrust forward and her leather skirt falls away between her legs, and her flesh is enticing. With my one pair of fingers splicing Grace's centre and she grips me tight into her, I touch my other hand to Alexandra's leg, on the inside of it, and she moves it forward at my touch to make it easy for me, and I slide my fingers up her calf and thigh until the tips of them are at the touch of her wet heat, for she too is slick and aroused. I cannot see my hand now, as it is covered by the leather which flows over my arm like a softness.